Otto

This fellow has quite a history. One day I was drawing faces as usual, and I drew a face with no expression. I looked at it for a minute and I thought "Wow, it is a completely expressionless face". Rather miraculously a name popped into my head. "Otto"... Aside from being a palindrome, it also seemed to fit his rounded bald head, etc. Perfect name. So I had this idea. What if I could put Otto in various places where he would be discovered by people. So I duplicated him via photocopier. I made a hundred of them and cut them all out. I would say the dimensions were about a half inch, by an inch, or so. Small. So I was working at this place called DESIGNS BY GWEN at the time. No one there understood my rather crazy and bizarre sense of humor (not sure anyone does), and so I thought I would entertain myself using Otto. I began putting these things everywhere. I kept a pocket full of them and whenever I had a moment, I would put an Otto somewhere. Under the phone reciever, on top of a pile of clothes, inside an important file, under the bosses coffee cup on her desk, etc. It was so much fun to see the confused look on their faces whenever they found another one. Then I began varying the sizes. I'd make one 3"x5" or larger. My largest one was around 12" x 20". I attached that one to the passenger side of my co-worker Ricky Perez's car. Ha ha! I made hundreds of variations of Otto. Below is a few of them. But the one I always went back to was the good old original Otto. I refer to him as an emotional zombie. Ha! I had too much fun with Otto! One time Gwen's mom was sweeping up the floor out in the warehouse and overheard her say "Someone's trying to drive me crazy with these..." I looked down and she was sweeping up 2 or 3 Otto's. LOL!!! One of my favorite art moments! By the way... the original original Otto... the very first one I drew... is lost. I don't know where it is. I had it for a little while, but alas... I don't know where he disappeared to. Variations on a theme: